This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autofictional seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

Journeying to America

The next afternoon you appeared with Hua as guest contestants on the “The People’s Republic’s Got Talent” television show with star host Wink Chang. Since you were sixty-two and exhausted from sex, you and Hua found yourselves relegated to the senior citizen version of the show, immensely popular with the Mainland’s aging population. Hua promised to “chew ground glass,” a local expression meaning “to be with child,” should you two win the jackpot of 40,0000 renminbi on the show. You are overjoyed but skeptical, as her pregnancy would defy the one-child policy you still cleaved to. There was that son you had by a woman in Yangshuo Town that Dua didn’t know about, after all.

As longtime fans of Chinese opera, you informed Wink that you would display your talent by singing three songs as a duet: “The Internationale,” the theme from Lady Wang Zhaojun, and an ancient folk song entitled “The Latent Bee,” recently recorded by Taylor Swift.

Your rendition of “The Latent Bee” went like this:

The latent bee

Will stingeth thee

Where thou least expect it to be.

You and Hua garbled the words but performed movingly, and the elderly studio audience erupted in class solidarity. Pocketing her half of the 40,000 prize, Hua told you she was off to college in the U.S. under Beijing’s “No Limits Partnership” with Pane Community College in Arizona, where she would study body sculpting and food engineering You told her you would meet her there later but had something important to do first: you needed to replace your vital organs with harvested younger ones, thereby transforming yourself into a Western-style college freshman complete with an eighteen-year-old body and fluency in English.

A year later, your wallet flattened by the costly operation, you were admitted as a freshman to Pane Community College under the Belt and Road and Textbook Initiative. Saying goodbye to your corn-raising relatives, you left Jilin Province to catch up with Hua, reaching Pane Community College in a scrub-covered field in Arizona after crossing the porous southern border from Mexico. You were excited not only to see Hua once more, but a web search had returned titillating information on the college. The school described itself as one with a strong social conscience, which you interpreted as “party school,” and the official handbook online showed Pane girls with bangs and pierced ears having fun, right up your breezeway.

The website gals looked thin when viewed from the side, skinny as posters, and you were delighted. You disdained the typical thick American type, humorously called “pawgs.” Hua was never thin enough for you, as her breasts often exceeded several inches in length during her monthlies. Yet overall she was ribbon-thin. Her great-grandparents had lived through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and along with many residents of Shaanxi Province, they had dieted. Hua had inherited their thinness, and her limbs resembled filaments of straw, the way you liked.

But to your disappointment, you were assigned to a dorm dedicated to foreign students and others from beyond America’s borders—solid, beefy students from Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Germany. Not only were the students outsize, this was not the fun-filled residence the slim Pane kids occupied in the handbook, either. To start with, you couldn’t locate your room in this dormitory for foreigners, a crumbling, three-story building that resembled a derelict hotel in Daoxiang Village. There was a diner and a barber shop out front, and the stench of garbage and gravy extended to the interior, where a corpulent individual pointed you toward a halting and creaking elevator like a bored bellhop.

Worse than that, after disembarking on the third floor with your wheeled trunk in tow, you found yourself in near total darkness with no light switch to reveal room #303, your destination.

Stumbling around in the oppressive and smelly dark, which your phone flashlight failed to pierce, you found no rooms or doors, but kept brushing against what felt like a filthy stage curtain that descended from the ceiling somewhere above your head. Was it possible room #303 was a kind of tent and this foul curtain its lining? After thirty minutes of searching, and finding only some porky guys who refused to give you directions, you managed to return to the elevator and leave this dreadful place.

Your next order of business was to put in for a change of room. Pulling your wheeled trunk down a narrow main street, you proceeded to the Housing Office. This lay within the only building on campus, a small wood and glass structure that resembled a rural post office back home, standing as it did in a field of grass and brush dried out and singed by the sun or maybe a fire. You observed a number of young people outdoors, of medium build like you, but they seemed in a hurry, and you didn’t try to talk to them.

You also noticed a lot of paper silhouettes propped up on the grass and along the street that you hadn’t seen earlier, as if they had just come out of hiding. The silhouettes, shaped like human figures, stood only a few feet high, and waved in the warm morning breeze. Likely the silhouettes were suspended from thin wires, since they didn’t blow away, and were advertisements or games of some sort. You got close enough to a group of them to stare and wonder, and thought you heard whispering, but you entered the building without stopping to listen.

No one was inside, but the walls were banked floor to ceiling with locked mailboxes, and the space marked Housing Office was a simple slot in the wall. A small table held pen and paper, and you wrote a note stating that, although you were from China, you wished to reside with native Americans, to have the full college experience.

Scarcely had you slipped the paper into the slot than your phone pinged, and you read a text that you had been reassigned to dorm #4 within the campus building, the only building there was, and notifying you to use your phone for future communications with the Housing Office, as the mail drop was now out of service.

Dorm #4 was several paces down the hall, and similarly vacant, though a good deal more spacious than the slot of the Housing Office. Here stood wooden bookshelves and a large wooden display rack of periodicals, like the magazine section at any public library. There was also a small reading table in the center of the well-lighted room, with two small chairs and two computers, and a foldable futon open on the glossy wooden floor.

Seeing no signs of prior ownership, and thinking it must have been spread out for you, you wheeled your trunk over by the futon and took possession of it. Tired from your long journey across ocean and desert, you lay down on the flexible mattress and wondered where your dormmates might be. It seemed so strange to be by yourself. Were you supposed to be at some orientation function for new arrivals? You didn’t think so, and your classes didn’t start until tomorrow, so where was everybody?

You began to feel drowsy, and only now did you notice that several of the silhouettes had gathered near you on the floor. You noticed more silhouettes, or pages as you thought of them, standing on the computer table, bending back and forth in an artful way. You heard the faint rustling of paper, and then weak voices that might have come from far down the hall, but were quite near to you. The speakers, and it must have been these pages, seemed to have no wind in their lungs, and you strained to make out their words. But for that you needed a microphone, or maybe a stethoscope.

One or two of the short paper dolls, which the silhouettes resembled, seemed very excited over your presence, and when they twisted this way and that, you saw that they were two-dimensional, having almost no depth to their sides. From the front they appeared to be people your own age, eighteen years or surgically rejuvenated like you, guys and girls mingled together, only flattened out like prints. Their backs, however, showed gray blanks.

Looking up from your recumbent position on the futon, You saw that one of the paper silhouettes had drifted right beside you, and on it you saw the bangs and pierced ears of a smiling girl, reminding you of the sweet chicks in the college handbook online. Her smile held steady as a photograph, and you smiled back at her. Still, you weren’t sure if she and the others were indignant about your encroaching on their dorm or were overjoyed to see you, since her smile might mean anything.

Before you could explain that someone else had set your futon here, the young woman, if that’s what she was, beckoned to you by bending her page in a come-hither motion. She then led you out of the room, floating before you. Perhaps she spoke to you also, but her voice was too tiny for you to hear. Folded-up futon and trunk handle in hand, you followed her.

She led you along a hallway lined with shelves piled high with magazines, pamphlets, and folders. Here too there was a great rustling of pages, and the sound of distant voices that never drew near. Moreover, a cloud of dust, grayish as if from the pages and spines of old books, swirled through the air. Bright bodies pulsed within the gray cloud, like the rapidly flipped pages of a colorful magazine. “Interesting place,” you said in English as you followed the floating page along the lengthy hall. If she heard you, she gave no sign.

She halted at a spot where the shelves were nearly empty of folders, and the air was clear of dust and flashing images. It was quiet here too, and a light came on against the dimness. A door closed also, granting you and the girl complete privacy.

As if wafted by a breeze, the page sailed up to the shelf beside a folder that lay alone, one with a red felt cover secured by a flimsy heart-shaped lock and labeled “Hua—Do Not Enter.” She then retrieved, from somewhere on her person, a key as thin as foil. She placed it within the lock for you to turn, and drifted back to the floor, standing with her bottom edge against the futon you had laid there. The page trembled a bit, perhaps in anticipation, and then folded herself to sit down, her thin wire spine flexing.

“Hua?” you said, the truth of the matter becoming manifest to you. “Can this be you? How you have changed in America!”

She was silent, and you smiled your old smile. “Well, Hua, I’m coming in,” you said, opening the delicate lock and lifting the folder down to the futon. You sat beside her and opened the file so both of you could look into it, as that seemed to accord with her wishes.

You thumbed through the pages, each the size of her, and saw baby girl and little girl pictures at the front, these giving way to adolescent and high school shots, some verging on the risqué and showing the young woman Hua scantily clad, reminding you of a lingerie catalog. It was as if each page was an earlier version of Hua, and all the slices of her life were bound together, with more to come.

Toward the end of the file her handwritten diary began, and on the last completed page of this you read, “Off to college in America! So excited! Who knows who I’ll meet? Plan to let a boy stamp my envelope at the frosh mixer.” A scrawl in a different hand followed, saying, “Great time at the mixer, Hua,” and was signed, “Dan.”

Since the frosh mixer in question had taken place a year ago, who knew what had happened between Hua and Dan? And why was there no mention of you, as one Hua sorely missed and pined for? Promising yourself that if there were other mixers, you wouldn’t miss a one of them, you turned the page and discovered a wrapped condom inserted there. Glancing at Hua, you saw the page shimmying. You tore open the wrapper and found the usual device for men, except it wasn’t tipped with a nipple or a tickler, but an odd paper cap that trailed off into fine tendrils like springtime wheat in Shandong Province. Hua was now rippling, and when you finished a tiny wet spot remained on her page.

You continued to stare at the page, and as the damp stain dried before your eyes, handwriting appeared under it without the intervention of a hand or pen, forming round, girlish letters. You read the words as they flowed across the page: “A great time, babe! Maybe I’ll see you again!—Hua.”

“But Hua!” you cried out to the page, “don’t you recognize me? We once walked arm-in-arm together on Fragrant Bay Bridge.” But Hua promptly burst into flames, her edges turning black and curling, though there was no evident fire-starter. Had she flicked your cigarette lighter with her papery hands? But the lighter was safely tucked away in your trunk, you were sure of that. Had she brushed against an electrical source or heater? You saw no such hazard. Still, Hua was consumed by the sudden blaze as she fled to the door and slipped under it, fine ash falling from her wire spine to the floor. The only part of her that passed under the door was that filament-like spine, heated red hot.

You rushed to open the door, and found many pages on fire along the hall and around the computer and bookshelves, combusting to ash in moments as they waved back and forth. The scene reminded you of the Torch Festival at home, where a breeze stirred the burning leaves of a bonfire to char and smoke. At home too there had been a barely audible chorus of the perishing as they crackled and hissed. You wondered now if those fallen leaves had still been alive, though they had dropped from trees days or weeks before they burned, and already should have been dead.

Then—what heat seared you!—the bookshelves loaded with folders lit up, but there were no smoke alarms, no extinguishers, no firemen. Was the community college built to burn? In a panic you ran from the building, the cries of the pages filling your ears, to a blazing field outside. “Water!” you cried into the fire, but there came no answer.